


Balance and Free Fall

by labellementeuse



Category: Original Work
Genre: Action/Adventure, Fake New Zealand, Identity Porn, Interpersonal Drama, M/M, Very Political Supervillains, casefic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-15
Updated: 2017-05-15
Packaged: 2018-10-24 14:38:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10743732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/labellementeuse/pseuds/labellementeuse
Summary: Jamie just wants to pass his English paper, catch supervillains, and dodge his mother's phone calls. Well, one out of three ain't bad.





	Balance and Free Fall

**Author's Note:**

  * For [VanaTuivana](https://archiveofourown.org/users/VanaTuivana/gifts).



> VanaTuivana, you were a pleasure to write for. I had a great time in this exchange and I really hope you enjoy what I came up with.
> 
> Thank you to A for a beta, H and A for audiencing and encouraging, and M for that last-minute reassurance. I love you guys. Title is from Cilla McQueen, "Quark Dance".

"Don't forget your parents want to call you tonight," Jamie's gran yells as he ducks out the door. "Turn your bloody phone on!"

"Yeah, yeah," he says, and jams a hand in his pocket to fumble at it.

That's his first mistake, but he won't figure that out until later.

* 

Half an hour later Jamie slinks his way into ENGL207 ten minutes late with dark glasses on and slumps into a seat at the back of the lecture theatre, hoping nobody will notice him. Unfortunately, his slump is less than graceful, and his course notes slip off the narrow bench and land with a loud smack in the row in front of him. 

Jamie slides a little lower in his seat as half the class turns around to look. At the front of the hall, Dr Burnside pauses, flicks him a glance, and then, to his infinite relief, keeps talking about Samuel Butler. 

The guy in front of him leans over in his chair to pick up Jamie's notes and, because it's Jamie's life and that's how things go, when he turns to drop the folder on top of the rest of Jamie's stuff he realises it's The Guy, the total babe he's been drifting off thinking about in class since the beginning of the semester. The Guy's jeans fit him like a glove. When The Guy wears t-shirts, his forearms look amazing. The Guy is black, about Jamie's height, about Jamie's age. Jamie saw The Guy at a UniQ party so he's pretty sure The Guy is gay. Or bisexual. Or has friends who are gay. The Guy is, frankly, beautiful, and way out of Jamie's league.

The Guy raises an eyebrow at him, because Jamie's staring at him like a weirdo; Jamie, mumbling a thank-you, feels way too aware of his unwashed hair, the bags under his eyes, the hoodie he threw on over his jeans. 

It's not his fault, thank you very much. Being a superhero just really fucks with your schedule. 

*

"Don't you have class tomorrow morning?" the Shadow had asked the night before, gliding up on a breeze to perch beside Jamie where he crouched in costume on one of the pipes forming a 1990s-style theoretically decorative abstract crown around the roof of the Regal Centre. Her scarves fluttered in the wind; lit from below by the Wind City lights, she looked more like her namesake than ever, a blot of blacker-than-black high above the street.

The Shadow's almost always right—an unattractive quality in a mentor, in Jamie's opinion—and Jamie usually doesn't listen, which he's been claiming for the last three years is part of his job as teen sidekick. In that spirit—and he'll acknowledge now that just this once listening to her might not have been the end of the world—he'd just laughed. "Yeah," he'd said, "but a little bird told me the Voice's shifting something around at Shed 51 tonight."

"You can probably catch that guy _and_ get an education," the Shadow had said, but in a tone indicating she knew perfectly well Jamie wasn't really listening. "You know there are other criminals in the world, right, Blink?" 

"This one's special," Jamie had said.

"Um," she said. "Specially non-threatening? Because—"

"He wears beige," Jamie said. "Beige! It's offensive. And his powers don't match his name. I mean, he's a speedster, right? But he calls himself the Voice. It's untrustworthy and frankly bad villain behaviour."

The Shadow had made the kind of non-committal noise she used to indicate Jamie was probably full of shit.

"Plus he tied me up those two times and I'm still a little pissed," Jamie said, and launched himself out into the air, relishing the rush of air and the city rushing up towards him, closer and closer, until he—  
—blinked—  
and with a flash of purple light landed, on his feet and running towards the docks, three buildings down. 

*

In the end, though, he'd sat in the eaves of Shed 51 until 4 o'clock in the morning and hadn't seen hide nor hair of the Voice, or any of his distinctively dressed minions. He crawled into and out of bed with what felt like about ten minutes of sleep, stumbled his way out the door with his grandmother yelling at him, and now he's sitting in this lecture theatre trying to pay attention to Samuel Butler's quasi-utopia, barely clothed, with the hottest guy in the world three feet away from him. Jamie resists the urge to sniff at his armpits and tries not to fantasise about teleporting out of the room to somewhere absolutely nobody can see him. 

The class takes about a million years, but it finally finishes. Jamie drops his head onto his books and groans in relief as the rest of the class stands up and starts filtering out. 

Someone taps him on the shoulder and he raises his head. The student sitting next to him, a dark-haired, brown-skinned woman about his age, gives him a big smile. "Hey, Jamie, are you caught up with the readings?"

Half-wondering how she knows his name, Jamie says, cautiously, "Yeah?"

Her smile, if possible, brightens. "Oh, awesome! Because I'm really struggling with it, and I wondered if you wanted to get coffee tonight and talk about it?"

Jamie's too tired to tell if she's making a pass at him or actually wants his insight on _Erewhon_ , but since he's planning on stalking a bad guy tonight he decides it doesn't much matter. "I'm sorry," he says, trying to sound sincere, "I can't tonight, I've got to take a call from my mum." She blinks, and looks a little deflated. "Sorry," he says, again, and tries to look it. 

"That's okay!" she says, perking up a little. "Maybe another time!"

"Maybe," Jamie says, and starts squeezing his way out of the row of seats.

Apparently the day isn't done with him, though; moving fast, half out of a sense of politeness so the woman behind him can leave and half because he absolutely has to get out of here, he slams out of the end of the row and right into The Guy, who's looking down, tucking his notes into his satchel. Jamie feels himself going bright red. He ducks down and picks up The Guy's notes, shoving them at him. What is the point of having superpowers, he asks himself, if he can't use them to escape life's mundane miseries?

The Guy's eyebrow is back up; Jamie half-wonders whether his face is stuck that way. It's a good look for him, though. Of course, just about everything is. It's not for nothing The Guy occupies prime place in Jamie's idle fantasies; he stands out among the sea of guys in in this lecture theatre who are wearing short-shorts and a t-shirt layered over a long-sleeved shirt like a rose among thorns. An extremely handsome, masculine rose who never wears short-shorts. 

"Rough morning?" He sounds amused, faintly supercilious.

Jamie, internally screaming and a little ticked at the guy's tone, fights back his blush. "Something like that," he says. "Catch you later," and he ducks away. 

*

Jamie doesn't know whether to blame sleep deprivation, being pissed about his total failure the previous evening, or the ongoing sting of embarrassment for what happens next. A bit of all three, he supposes, but it's not a great reminder of just how human he really is when, at 11 o'clock that night, while sneaking, breathing as shallowly as he can, into the warehouse he's pretty sure the Voice is operating out of, his bloody phone starts playing "Mama, I'm a Big Girl Now", because, of course, his mum is calling.

He goes to silence his phone, but it's too late. There's a zap and a blur of light and the Voice is there in front of him, in his terrible beige costume that shows all the dirt (and what happens when he gets wet, Jamie's hindbrain wonders. There's got to be a Mr Darcy at Pemberley thing going on there. Jamie's hindbrain flashes up a few speculative images; the Voice is probably cut under the suit. It's not a bad thought). 

"You again," the Voice says. 

"Hey there!" Jamie says, and tries to blink, but the Voice reaches out like lightning and grabs his arm. Fuck, Jamie hates it when villains learn. It's not that he can't teleport when someone's holding him, but it makes it so much harder, and he's got almost no chance if he's distracted by, you know, having to fight a supervillain.

And his phone's still ringing. 

Jamie punches the Voice in the face; he grunts in pain, but he's still hanging on. 

"Over here!" he says, and clings to Jamie as Jamie writhes around to kick him in the small of the back. 

The song blaring embarrassingly from Jamie's phone is getting to the point where it's going to send his mum to voicemail, and a bunch of minions are appearing from the depths of the warehouse in Minionwear Standard: heavy jeans, checked shirts, big jackets. It's a timeless look minions have been deploying for as long as Jamie's been following the Shadow around, a thought that distracts him as he finally twists out of the Voice's grip, kicks a minion in the head and makes to blink. Unfortunately, the Voice isn't as stupid as his outfit, and he yells, "Grab him!" 

Jamie's a badass, but he's not that much of a badass when surrounded by fifteen guys carrying crowbars who aren't afraid to use them and with no exit route, so he sticks his hands up as the Voice's minions grab fistfuls of his costume and says, looking right at the Voice and jerking his head towards his singing pocket, "Mind if I get this?"

His mask is flat to his face, basically a super high-tech stocking, so Jamie can see his brow wrinkle as he says, "Please don't let me interfere with your social calendar."

"Thanks, man," Jamie says, and gets the phone just before it goes to voicemail, grinning at the disbelieving look the Voice gives him. "Hello," he says, and winces as he gets blasted with the full force of his mother's personality, coming at him down the line from middle-of-nowhere, Australia. 

Jamie makes listening noises as his mum gets into full flow, keeping the hand that's not holding his phone to his ear up, trying to look as nonthreatening as possible; still, he sees the Voice stiffen when he says "Ae, Mum." He spares half a thought to wonder what he could possibly be reacting to—maybe it's just that he doesn't believe it's Jamie's mum, either because he thinks all sidekicks really are orphans or because he suspects him of being on the phone to the Shadow. Little does he know Amal bugs all of Jamie's costumes and also his phone, but frankly, being distracted on the phone with Jamie's mum is pretty much asking to find yourself committed to something you really don't want to do, so he stops thinking much about the disastrous situation he's in and starts paying attention. He doesn't want a repeat of the "accidentally agreed to a date with Mum's best friend's niece's cousin" situation, or time he yes-Mum'd himself into a local radio interview about the role of indigenous people in water preservation. It's not that he doesn't care about the things his mother spends her time on; it's just that he's got enough on his own plate.

It takes fifteen minutes for him to give his mother an update on his life that satisfies her, a particularly tricky job given how aware he is that there's a masked villain and a bunch of thugs staring at him and how much he doesn't want to give them identifying information. Then it's another ten minutes making interested noises and carefully navigating his way out of promising to get a haircut before his mum makes a kissy noise down the phone and tells him she has to go, and his father sends his love.

"Love you, Mum," he says, trying not to sound too relieved. "Love to Dad. Bye," and he hangs up almost before she's said the same to him.

"That was ... really your mum," says the Voice, sounding baffled, even through the weird resonant voice he either has or fakes for the purposes of his life of crime or uses a voicebox to produce—Jamie's seen all three.

"Believe me, it's more than my life's worth not to pick up," Jamie says. "Now, where were we?"

"I believe I was tying you up," the Voice says, and flicks a finger at his minions. They drag him over to a corner where there's a convenient hook hanging from the ceiling. God knows what it was used for; Jamie can't tell that it has any meaningful warehousing use, but he's come to learn that there's always something villains can tie him to, no matter what the building's original purpose. It's some kind of natural law, so he doesn't fight too hard, only kicks a few guys in the face before they have him fairly well immobilised.

"There we go," the Voice says, looking satisfied. "All right, boys, let's finish up," and they shrug and nod, heading into the shadowy warehouse. Shortly Jamie hears the distinctively prosaic sound of crates being dragged about, split open, picked up and dropped. The Voice just stands there, staring at Jamie.

Jamie gives him his best grin and twists in the ropes. "Enjoying this? Kinky."

The Voice scoffs. "You don't look unhappy yourself."

He shrugs, as much as he can. "Hazard of the occupation."

"I bet it is," the Voice says. His tone is … well, it's how Jamie remembers it being last time the Voice had him tied up, which is to say, flirty without being sleazy--a sweet spot supervillains hardly ever hit, in Jamie's experience, especially when they're using an obviously fake voice. Actually, the Voice is the only one he's ever met that manages it. 

"You'd know, of course. What's this, the third time you've tied me up?"

The Voice shrugs a single shoulder, and turns away to look at the activity going on deeper in the warehouse. Jamie lets out a silent sigh of relief and twists his hands around enough to start working on the knots. He doesn't have to get completely free; if he can loosen them just enough, he'll be able to blink right out. 

"I suppose it explains your incompetence, if you like this kind of thing so much," the Voice says, abruptly swinging back to him. 

Jamie tries not to look annoyed, casts around wildly for something vaguely witty to send the guy off-balance. "Maybe I just like you," he tries. It's a weak attempt, but weirdly it seems to work. The beige mask goes still for a second, and Jamie allows himself to feel a moment of triumph, and then another one when, high above them both, a window smashes. 

The Voice whips round, looking searchingly into the warehouse. Jamie tenses his wrists in the ropes and releases, tenses and releases, trying for just a little slack, until there's a thump from the darkness.

"Hey," Jamie says. The Voice half-turns. "Actually, I should be honest," he says, breezy. " 'How to lie to supervillains and also all your friends and family' is the first chapter in the Big Book of Sidekick Virtues, but we're just getting to know each other, so I want to level with you." Plus he's pretty sure the guy has figured this one out, but if Jamie can keep him talking for just a little bit longer... "Getting tied up is actually a pretty good—"

He doesn't finish it off, because she's there, out of the shadows, Jamie's own personal god and avenging angel, the Shadow of the City. She's not there, and then she is there, moving from one shadow to the next; in one movement she kicks at the Voice's head and turns, and then she's punching him from a different angle, and he's grunting and doubling over, and the Shadow turns to Jamie. 

"I'm fine," he says, urgent. "I'm out, go," as the ropes slacken just enough and he can blink out of them, but it's too late; the Voice straightens, looking as pissed as a blank mask can, and then he's running. Jamie can catch anyone in the daytime, blinking from wherever he is to anywhere he can see, but it's dark in here, hung with wires and ropes and sheets of plastic; he tries, but the asshole's gone. Fucking speedsters, Jamie thinks, and goes to help the Shadow round up the collection of plaid-wearing doofuses she's scattered over the warehouse floor.

Annoyingly, the Voice had time to spray-paint one of his charming messages on the wall before he left. HEAR THE VOICE, it says. Typical, Jamie thinks, and stains his costume red smudging it out.

*

The doofuses know basically nothing, the Shadow determines, as she and Jamie hang out in her tricked-out garden shed drinking apple tea and watching feeds from the cameras the Shadow has planted in the police station. The Shadow—real name Amal, real occupation physics professor and advanced scientific brain—flicks between interrogation rooms and the guys sleeping on benches and having secretive conversations in the lock-up, but they're all short-term hires, paid in cash; they don't know anything about the Voice, didn't even really know what they were moving. Some of them were hired through a poster on the board at the student union, for crying out loud, although why they didn't turn around and leave when they saw the beige-clad weirdo who'd hired them ... 

"What a bust," Jamie says, and scrubs a hand through his hair. 

"Not completely," Amal says. She's half-in, half-out of her costume, scarves draped all over the room, except the one keeping her hair out of her face. "He didn't get to move all those crates and we know what was in them."

"Right," says Jamie, and leans over on the bench to poke at the contents—small springs, triggers, spray-mouths, detonators. Basically, it's masked villain clutter, the type of stuff they all litter their lairs with and deploy in a dozen different ways, ranging from the mildly-annoying flash-bang to the shrapnel-bomb dangerous. "Clues," he says, sepulchrally. 

"You know how I feel about clues," Amal said. 

"Overrated."

"That's right," she says. "I'll trace these. You should go home," she says. "We've got a lab tomorrow."

Jamie moans. "You had to remind me." Some things about taking physics classes taught by his superhero mentor are great; some aren't, especially since Amal refuses to give extensions for anything other than life-threatening danger and kidnapping, and she has a pretty good idea of when Jamie's dealt with that or not.

She shrugs, heartless. "I told you to go to a different university, get out of the business to study."

"Right," said Jamie. "And apart from leaving you in the lurch, you think a lot of labs would take it well if I showed up and said I wanted to do independent research in the field of teleportation, do you?"

She grins. "Probably not. So I guess you'll just have to suffer through my labs, won't you?"

*

Suffer isn't really the word for it, Jamie thinks, cudgelling his way through a physics lab the next morning. It's more like purgatory; the lab stretches out for three hours until 12, every problem less interesting than the previous one, every explanation from the tutor dragged out more by three identical questions from the rest of the class, who are all feeling unusually talkative that day or something. It's an unusual relief to slap his books shut, shove them into his bag and duck out and into the sunshine and clamour of the quad. 

Jamie points himself in the direction of the student union; he deserves a thoroughly chemical-tasting hotdog with cheese, in his opinion, and also if he doesn't get a coffee soon somebody's going to have a very bad day. That's what he's focusing on, which is why it's a surprise when he finally gets to the front of the way-too-long line at the bookshop's coffee machine, gets his coffee, drops it, and the guy behind him in the line who reaches past him lightning quick to catch it turns out to be Hot Guy. 

"Hey," he says, and smiles at Jamie, handing him his coffee.

"Holy shit, thank you," Jamie says. He feels himself start to flush. "Wow, that was fast! Thanks. I really needed this, obviously," and he shuts himself up by taking a drink.

"You're in ENGL207 with Burnside, right?"

"Yeah," Jamie says. 

"Right, right, I really dug what you said last week about colonial dystopia," Hot Guy says. 

"Oh, thanks," Jamie says, trying to sound cool and not at all like his inner monologue is currently shouting _HOT GUY NOTICED ME! ME!_.

"Yeah, it was pretty thoughtful." 

Jamie notices Hot Guy's gaze flicking down to his bag, where Jamie's stuck a tacky rainbow pin his mum bought him. Jamie returns the glance. Turns out Hot Guy's bag is covered in pins—rainbow flags, a Thursdays in Black badge, a tino rangatiratanga flag, Ban the Bomb. It's bristling; Hot Guy must have an extra kilo on there between pins and patches. 

He looks up and Hot Guy's looking at him looking at his bag. He meets Jamie's eyes and gives him the faintest flicker of a wink. Jamie can feel himself start to blush. 

"So, hey," Hot Guy says. "Would you want to get coffee sometime and talk about Samuel Butler? Burnside's kicking my ass."

Jamie's heard Hot Guy talk in class himself and he doesn't believe that for a second. "Sure," he says, as casually as he can. "Actually, now's good," and a big smile splits Hot Guy's face. 

*

They get coffee and settle into a quiet corner of the quad, cross-legged on the grass since it's still early enough in the year that the lawn isn't totally sodden. Hot Guy makes a few overtures about Samuel Butler and dystopias, and Jamie plays along for a bit, but pretty soon they're distracted, talking about themselves, their families, weekend plans. Hot Guy's name turns out to be, prosaically, Sam.

"I'm from Whangamomona," he says, and cracks up as Jamie's brow wrinkles. "Let me guess: you've never heard of it."

"I—no," Jamie says. "I was going to try to fake it but you're totally right, I've never heard of that and have no idea where it is."

Sam's still grinning; it's really unfairly attractive. "Up north," he says. "Middle of the island, about 5 hours' drive from Wind City. And yes," he says, "it's a small town. My parents farm."

"And you? Are you a farmboy?"

"God, no," Sam says. "That's my sister. No, I got out as quickly as I could. I mean, I go back for the holidays and stuff, but—no. I'm studying PPE so I never have to go back there."

"Politics, Philosophy, Economics, right?" Jamie says. "The big wide world of government work."

"You got me," Sam says. "Anyway, how about you?" He reaches over to where Jamie's bag's sitting, half-open, and tugs a textbook out. "I wasn't expecting this from a guy who knows so much about Samuel Butler," and he waggles it at Jamie.

"I promised my mum I'd take a writing credit every year," Jamie says, grinning. "She's on sabbatical at the moment, but she's actually a professor here." 

"English department?" 

"Nah, Māori Studies," Jamie says. "She studies historical and contemporary resource management. But she's obsessed with being able to write."

"Oh, that's cool," Sam says. He sounds genuinely excited, which is pretty unusual but Jamie guesses matches some of the stuff he's got pinned to his bag.

"Kinda," Jamie says. "But I'm studying physics. It was my rebellious phase."

Sam sticks his brows up. "Fancy," he says, and Jamie laughs, shakes his head. 

"It's really—no," he says. "But I like it. I know that makes me kind of a nerd."

"No way," Sam says. "You gotta own what you love, man," and he reaches out, slaps Jamie on the arm familiarly. Unfortunately, he hits right on a bruise from the night before, and Jamie winces.

Sam yanks his hand back, and before Jamie can stop himself he reaches out and grabs Sam's hand, puts it back on his arm. "No, don't—it's OK. I bumped into something the other day and there's a bruise there, that's all." He can feel himself start to blush again. _Stop embarrassing yourself_ , he thinks, but it doesn't help.

Sam doesn't pull away again. He squeezes gently, then rubs back and forth on Jamie's arm, soothingly. "Sucks," he says. He bites his lip; Jamie watches, transfixed. "Want me to kiss it better?" His voice is warm, smooth, just that hint of seductive. He slides his hand down Jamie's wrist until his hand's over Jamie's; Jamie, helpless before Sam's voice and his confident touch, turns his hand over, tangles his fingers with Sam's, and lets Sam draw him forward until their mouths brush together. 

Sam's mouth touches his, lightly, and then Jamie brings his other hand up to Sam's face and pulls him forward, closing the distance between them so they can kiss, thoroughly. It's a warm day already, but Jamie can feel himself getting hot at the feeling of stubble scraping past his mouth, Sam's warm skin under his fingers, the press of lips and tongues. 

Someone behind them wolf-whistles, and they break apart. 

Jamie's breathing hard. "I'm not sure that's where the bruise is," he says, somehow managing not to leap in the air and turn a cartwheel of glee. 

"But you feel better anyway, right?"

"Actually," he says, "yeah," and he starts to smile.

*

"He's very cute," Amal says. She's at her desk in the lab, papers spread out in front of her; Jamie's on the other side of her desk, theoretically seeking her help with office hours, actually logging on to the university's big computer to try to run some of the quantum-based maths he can't do on his student laptop. Jamie's been trying to duplicate his own superpowers almost since they manifested, one evening when he was running in the green belt, tripped, and fell down a cliff, only to blink himself back to the top; after six years, he's only just starting to get to grips with the maths involved.

At least he hasn't had to work hard to stay ahead of the curve in second-year physics classes.

"Who's cute?" he says, distracted. 

"The boy you're dating," she says, and Jamie jerks his head up to look at her. 

"Are you stalking me again? We talked about letting me know when you're going to invade my privacy like that."

She gives him a dry look. "I don't have to stalk you to know when you're seeing someone new, you know." 

"You do to know what he looks like," Jamie says, obstinate. "Come on, Amal, at least tell me when you have me under video surveillance." He's long ago given up trying to stop her surveilling him at all, but at least he usually knows about it. 

"I don't," she says. "Nothing more than you already know about, anyway," which is just the cameras at the door to Gran's apartment and the bug in his phone. "I was out patrolling last night and I saw you, that's all. You looked … friendly."

"That's what you get for spying on me," Jamie says. "TMI." 

She laughs. "I hope he's treating you right."

"He is," Jamie says, but it comes out sounding like innuendo, making Amal splutter. He gives her the finger, searches for a change of topic. "Anyway, how about those supervillains?"

"I really think 'supervillain' is overstating the case for this kid," Amal says, flicking open a folder on her desk and handing it to Jamie. The Voice's beige stocking glares up at him. Or doesn't glare, whatever. Looks expressionless and neutral. 

"Mask," Jamie says, "minions, weird voice disguise. Sounds like a supervillain to me." 

"Mm," she says, sounding unconvinced. 

"Bank robbery," Jamie points out, "right at the beginning."

"We're not even sure that was him," she says. 

"It was," Jamie says, utterly convinced. "The timing's right, and I've just got a feeling, boss."

"Fine, say it was, but the notes weren't traceable—and don't get me started on how dodgy that is and how dirty that money is likely to have been—so we'll never prove the connection. And since then, it's just been shipments at weird times of night, petty theft, some stealing. No violence—except when we show up—or blood, guts, or murder."

Warming to her theme, Amal drags out one shot of a crime scene. Empty crates, spray-painted letters, the usual. "This cargo he hijacked, for example. Did you know the person who ordered it paid cash, gave a pseudonym, and never showed up to complain that his stuff got stolen? I think the guy ordered it himself, and stole it in the middle of the night just to be an asshole. If he wasn't wearing a mask I'm not sure we'd be spending any energy on this guy."

"There's the explosives." And Jamie's working a line on graffiti, but that hasn't quite come together yet.

"That's true." She bites her lip. "Still, let's keep a sense of proportion about it, shall we? He hasn't blown up anything—"

"—yet," Jamie says. 

"All right, you're not wrong to be concerned, but don't do for this guy what you did for the last one, okay?"

Jamie winces. He hadn't exactly covered himself in glory in his last set of exams, spending too many nights on rooftops and punching bad guys in service of tracking down the last masked asshole. "I'd do it again," he says. 

"And if we were dealing with someone like that guy again, you'd be right to. But for this guy, let's relax a bit." Her tone is warm, but final; there's not a lot of point arguing with her in this mood.

"You're the boss," Jamie says, but with less sarcasm than he usually deploys, enough that Amal knows he's taking her seriously. He closes the folder and turns back to trying to figure out what on earth his leptons are doing when he blinks. 

*

So that's how the semester goes for a while. Jamie keeps seeing Sam; what starts as coffee dates after class spirals into movies, dinner, meeting the friends. They take long walks on the beach, which makes Jamie want to throw up from the cute. And Sam's surprisingly tolerant of Jamie's weird hours; he buys it every time Jamie makes up a lab emergency, accepts every implausible excuse Jamie throws out when he leaves half-way through a date because the Shadow's paged him. 

Jamie takes a bunch of shots and samples of graffiti, runs some chemical analysis in the Shadow's garden lab, but other than that limits his superheroic extracurriculars to when Shadow asks for his help. Between his love life, his double life, and student life, Jamie squeezes in dinners with his gran and the occasional phone call from his mum; when the planets align, he even manages to catch up on some sleep. 

He's sacrificing sleep the first night he goes back to Sam's place. Sam's come round to Jamie's, met his gran, met some of Jamie's mates, but it's a while before Jamie goes round to Sam's. It's a sex thing, Jamie thinks. Jamie lives with his elderly relative, so when Sam visits him there there's no particular pressure. On the other hand, when he goes round to see Sam's place for the first time, a flat that he shares with a lesbian couple in a wooden villa on a winding road up behind the university, his palms are sweating when he comes up the path. He feels oddly conscious of his whole body and weirdly nervous, something he hasn't felt before sex in a long time. _It's because you really like this guy,_ something at the back of his brain suggests, and he shrugs it off. _No, it's because I didn't fuck on the first date like I usually do_ , and he wipes his hands off on his jeans and knocks. 

Sam must be waiting behind the door or something because it swings open pretty much right away. He smiles at Jamie, a little shyly, and Jamie smiles back and feels all the nerves go right out of him. "Hi," he says, and leans forward to kiss Sam. 

Sam leans into it, and it goes from sweet to hot quickly. Sam reaches out with one arm and the door shuts behind Jamie; then he's being walked backwards and pressed into the door, and Sam's resting his full weight against Jamie to kiss him, so they're pressed together all along their bodies, and Jamie can feel Sam hot and heavy against him. 

Somewhere behind Sam, somebody coughs. "Get a room," a woman's voice advises, "or at least get out of the way; I have a tutorial tonight." 

They break up their clinch; Sam winces. "So, ah, wanna see my secret hideout?"

"I really do," Jamie says, and follows him through the flat, barely looking around to see a surprisingly light, warm flat, a kitchen open to the living room, and a tall white woman with purple hair making an amused face at them. Instead, he's watching Sam, the way he moves through his space, and he keeps watching Sam as Sam takes one hand and drags him into his bedroom. 

Jamie spares a glance for the room. It's pretty tidy, certainly tidier than Jamie's room, and the walls are papered with posters; he doesn't have time to read them, though, before Sam swings him round until he's standing by the bed, cups his face in his hands and kisses him thoroughly. 

Jamie is fully on board with this plan, kissing back enthusiastically, running one hand from Sam's waist down to his ass and squeezing until Sam makes a noise against his mouth and shoves him backwards. 

Jamie hits the bed and lets himself fall backwards, wriggles up until he's lying there, looking up at Sam, who's looking back at him with an expression that makes Jamie's stomach flip. He looks—turned on, hot, hungry, but at the same time something in his expression is amazed, grateful, and Jamie feels himself go warm all over as he drops his hands to his jeans and pops the button on his fly. "Come here," he says, his voice coming out husky, and Sam does, climbing onto the bed with indecent haste, and coming to rest with his knees either side of Jamie's hips. 

Sam drops down, grinds against Jamie's dick for a moment. Jamie moans, bucks up, but then Sam's taking his wrists in each hand, leaning up to put them above Jamie's head, tentatively. 

Jamie pants out, "Yeah," lets it happen, and Sam's grip firms up as he presses Jamie's hands together on the pillow above Jamie's head.

"Knew you'd like that," he says, looking like the cat that got the cream, and Jamie twists his wrists, teasingly, just enough to make Sam press his wrists down more firmly.

He holds them there with one hand and runs the other hand down to Jamie's fly, rubbing up against Jamie's dick; Jamie moans, twists against Sam's hand pinning him down and Sam's hand owning him between his legs. He doesn't try to break free, though he knows perfectly well he could. Sam's hold is firm but inexpert and Jamie's been pinned to the ground by dozens of people at this stage, knows every trick for breaking a pin, but he wants it, wants Sam to hold him there, and Sam seems to know it, presses Jamie down and bites at his neck and rubs him through his pants until he comes, helplessly. 

Jamie rests for a moment, eyes closed, catching his breath. Sam lets his hands go, and he flexes them, twists them together, and then opens his eyes to see Sam staring at him from inches away.

"Okay?" he says, and Jamie grins. He puts a hand on Sam's shoulder and pushes him over, then straddles him and leans in to kiss him. 

"Let me show you just how okay that was," he says, and wriggles his way down Sam's body until he can unzip Sam's fly, reach into his boxers, and press his mouth up against the head of Sam's dick. 

*

After, throat a little sore, Jamie strips off his clothes and Sam's. Sam's limp from orgasm, lets him do it, looking faintly amused, and then lets Jamie get them under the covers and sprawl out next to him, one arm thrown over his waist. 

They're quiet for a moment, with just the sound of someone moving around in the kitchen outside filtering in, and Jamie takes the chance to look around Sam's room properly. He notes the stack of CDs, a dusty CD player, a much less dusty audio jack for the speakers, a dresser with the drawers mostly shut, a closet—so far, so typical. There are a few photos, a couple obviously of Sam's family, one of him in a sparkly silver top dancing with his flatmate. Then he looks at the posters papering the walls. They're bright and dark, slickly professional and hand-printed scribbles, printer paper handouts, covering every spare space—things Jamie's heard of, like Parihaka, Greenpeace, an old Rainbow Warrior poster, No Blood for Oil, Steve Biko styled like the Obama Hope poster, a Stop the Tour poster Sam must have photocopied out of a library, one for reproductive justice, and things he hasn't heard of, a green and white poster for something called the Howard League, a black and white prison abolitionist poster, hand-painted signs to end student loan debt. They cover the walls, some crowding each other out, small spaces filled in with pamphlets and stickers.

The effect is actually kind of beautiful. 

"No wonder you left Whangamomona," Jamie says. He can't really imagine being the kind of guy who cares about this many things, growing up in a tiny town hours away from even a small city.

"No kidding. I know it's kind of a lot," Sam says, watching where his eyes are. 

"No, I love it," Jamie says. "It's—you want to change things. I know what that's like."

"Yeah?" Sam's looking at him, Jamie can feel his eyes, but he doesn't look back. 

"Yeah," Jamie says, and reaches out to tangle his fingers with Sam's. 

Of course, that's when his phone goes off, beeping with the particularly urgent beep that means the Shadow needs Blink for something, right now, no waiting. _Fuck, fuck,_ , Jamie thinks, and launches himself out of bed to kick his clothes around until he can dig his phone out of his jeans pocket. 

The text just says _Need you at the lab_ , their usual code when something has gone absolutely pear-shaped. It better be fucking urgent, Jamie thinks, grim, when he turns to Sam. Sam's just watching him; he looks calm, maybe a little sad, like he already knows Jamie's going to leave, which of course he does, Jamie thinks, because god knows Jamie's ditched out on enough dates. 

"I'm really sorry," Jamie says. 

"Work emergency, huh?" Sam stretches. "It's okay, go on. I'll just, you know, lie here, think about you …"

Jamie swears, crawls back onto the bed to kiss Sam thoroughly. "Hold that thought, okay?" he says, against his mouth. "I'll be back—maybe tonight—"

"Don't worry, I get it," Sam says, patting Jamie as he pulls away. "I really do," and he really sounds like he does, so Jamie kisses him once more, pulls on his pants, and leaves.

*

He logs into their private messaging hub to find the Shadow's left him a set of coordinates, so he borrows one of her slick black motorbikes and finds her perched in a tree looking over a dark building in a residential suburb an hour's drive from the middle of Wind City. The light's starting to fade; she's a blot on a branch, scarves floating in the breeze .

"Hey," he says, blinking up behind her to find his own branch. 

She doesn't flinch, of course; the Shadow never does. "Hi," she says, and nods to the building. "So that analysis I was running panned out, finally. I'm pretty sure that's the Voice's secret lair."

"I thought you said he wasn't a supervillain," Jamie says. "Can you really have a secret lair if you're not a supervillain?"

"If your secret lair is four doors down from a garden centre and a block away from a kindergarten, sure," the Shadow says. "I want you to take the front. Make a big noise, lights if you can, see if you can draw some of them away. I'll go in the back."

"Can do," Jamie says. "Right now?"

"We could wait until it gets a bit darker," she says, "but I think now's better—they won't be expecting us while it's still light, maybe we'll get a bit of the element of surprise." 

"You're on," Jamie says. He fiddles with his utility belt, grabs a few toys, and then he leaps off the branch, blinks, feels the purple otherness of the space between squeeze at him, and then he's in front of the door. He knocks, loudly. 

There's no response. Jamie tries the door; it swings open. 

"Shadow," he says, through comms. "I think we might not be as much of a surprise as we thought," and steps back to throw in a handful of flashbangs. 

They go off and he leaps in behind them. He enters a darkened hallway, smoking a little from the flashbangs. It's empty, no doors off it, just a pile of boxes at one end that probably block off a door, and behind those boxes—of course. Three minions, armed, still in standard minionwear. 

They don't look surprised to see Blink. 

That's okay, though. They're surprised when he blinks in behind them and smashes two of their heads together, and they're surprised when he kicks their asses and leaves them handcuffed to each other and to the doorhandle, a note pinned to them for their arresting officer. 

The next room he enters is big, empty, a living room probably. The Shadow's standing in it, lit from behind by a fire that's burning in the big old fireplace, stuffed full of papers now turning to ash. The moving shadows on her scarves look amazing, make them seem to move independently, writhe and dance. 

Or maybe they look like that because the Shadow is pissed, glaring at the big red letters on the wall. THE VOICE WILL BE HEARD. 

"There's nothing here," she says, grim. "Not any more, anyway," as she kicks through the papery ashes in the fire. "Bad timing."

"Or they knew we were coming," Jamie says. "These guys were not surprised to see me."

"And there should have been more of them," the Shadow says. "My intel said at least ten people working out of this building, doing distribution. They must have noticed my data grabs."

"Fuck," Jamie says, and the Shadow nods in agreement. 

"I'm not even worried about this guy," she says, "but I really hate it when bad guys think they're ahead of me." She sighs. "Oh, well. I guess you can get back to your date, huh?"

"What, shut up," Jamie says, but grins when she flicks her fingers at him.

"Go on, get," she says. "I'll clean up here," and she turns away. 

*

Jamie's not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, so he gets, texting Sam on the way back in. It's after eight when he's showering, maybe too late to go back, but he can't stop himself, thinking about Sam, back in his room, in his bed … fuck. Jamie scrubs faster. 

Sam still hasn't texted back by the time he arrives at Sam's door, so he shrugs, and knocks. The woman with purple hair answers. She smiles when she sees Jamie, but looks confused. 

"You're Jamie, right? Sorry, kid. Sam's not here."

"He left just after you did," a voice from inside contributes, and another woman sticks her head around the corner. Her hair's orange. "He said he might not be back tonight."

"Did he say why?" 

She shakes her head. "Sorry," she says. "No idea."

"No worries," Jamie says. "I thought I was meeting him back here, but it must have been—crossed wires or whatever." He waggles his phone at them. "I'll chuck him a text."

"Good idea," she says. "Bye now," and Jamie waves, turns back down the street. 

Sam doesn't text him, and doesn't text him, even when Jamie texts, "I went to visit your bed but you weren't there :(". Jamie, disgruntled from the failed bust, feeling lonely, goes to bed early with his gran clucking over him, and wakes up to a string of apologetic-looking emoji from Sam. 

*

Jamie sort of wants to be annoyed, but it feels hypocritical; it's not like he doesn't vanish without telling Sam where he's going all the time, and he doesn't own Sam, so he forgets about it, deliberately, and nothing much happens for the next few weeks. The Voice has gone quiet again; Amal scrapes through the internet looking for a sign, but there doesn't seem to be anything, so she and Jamie kick a few unrelated heads in, break up some bar fights, stop a bank robbery, the usual, without hearing anything at all about Jamie's favourite masked villain. He's getting results on his analysis, but even the graffiti stops appearing.

He's distracted, though, by an upcoming set of exams and by Sam. They're spending more and more time together, in Sam's bed; studying in Jamie's living room while Gran reads in the corner, interrupting them to read out the worst lines from her romance novels and make them squirm; going for dinner in the tiny vegetarian restaurant on Square Street. Jamie goes to a few protests with Sam, has dinner at his flat with the women with coloured hair, who turn out to be Magda and Jilly; Sam comes out with Jamie's friends, goes to a LAN party, plays some boardgames. 

Jamie tells him he loves him. He doesn't mean to, but does it anyway, one night when he's staying over at Sam's, lying in a pile of sticky sweat, half-asleep. Sam doesn't say anything back; he probably didn't hear him, Jamie thinks, because Sam's sweet with him when Jamie needs sweet, shoves him around and pins him to the mattress when Jamie doesn't need sweet. He's still understanding when Jamie ducks out of dates. He plans picnics, is funny, charms Jamie's gran, so he's not the type of guy, Jamie thinks, who ignores someone when they tell him they love him. And it was probably kind of early anyway. Jamie's never told anyone he loved them before, except his mum and gran, so he doesn't say it again, but he's not worried. 

It's coming into winter now, getting cooler, so when they get a day of sun Sam drags Jamie outside. After an ENGL207 lecture, now getting around to Swift and Orwell, Sam makes Jamie walk down the hill with him to the law campus where he has his next lecture, a philosophy paper on the construction of government. 

They're early and it's lunch time, so they buy filled rolls and cans of drink and Sam tugs Jamie over to sit on the lawn outside Parliament. They eat in the sun, jeans getting damp, watching public servants and politicians come and go. 

"Hey," Sam says, dusting his pants off. "You ever done the tour?"

"Of Parliament?" Jamie laughs, because Sam's grinning, but he's serious, too. "Nah, man."

"Me either." Sam jumps up. "Come on, let's do it."

"What, now?" Jamie lets Sam pull him to his feet.

"Yeah, man. We've got to learn about our system of government, take a tour of the corridors of power."

"Gotta know them to beat them, huh?" Jamie says, but lets himself be moved.

They go through security and then stand in a queue for a while, holding hands and talking idly, watching a bunch of school children in red-and-white checked uniforms line up and get taken past them to an education centre. A crowd of tourists goes by, their guide speaking enthusiastically in Mandarin and gesturing to the big painting that winds its way around the first floor balcony, visible in the open atrium. Finally it gets to the top of the hour and a bright-faced guide comes out, gathers them all together. She makes them leave their bags in the visitor centre and then gently encourages the group to follow her. 

Jamie and Sam trail at the back of the group. Jamie tunes in and out of what the guide's saying, but mostly he watches Sam. He cranes his neck around to look at the art lining the walls, stops to stare up when they pass a lift that looks like it's come straight out of a movie from the 30s, all curlicued brass and metal. 

"You almost expect someone in an uniform operating it," Jamie says, and Sam laughs. 

He looks at the modern stuff, too, nudging Jamie when they pass under a camera. Jamie watches him look up and pull a hideous face. 

"You're on a watchlist now, boy," he says.

"Probably already am, what with my radical ways," Sam says, easily, and paces out with his long legs to catch up to the guide. 

They tour the debating chamber and a big open marbled atrium hung with art, and then the guide takes them downstairs through a bunch of low-ceilinged corridors, Sam's head nearly brushing the ceiling, so they can admire the base isolators, big columns making sure the building wobbles in an earthquake instead of shattering. After being underground it's a surprise to leave the building and blink out into sunshine, like leaving a movie theatre in the afternoon when he's expecting darkness.

*

A few days later Jamie's sprawled out in a chair in Amal's garden shed trying to figure out where the Voice has gone and what he might be up to. They've heard whispers, from time to time, but every time they follow them up there's nothing there. They visit empty warehouses, dank sheds, an abandoned hovel in the green belt, once a luxury apartment, icily bare, that has an incredible view over the city. At least leaving that one is fun; the Shadow drifts off the balcony and sails down on the breeze, lightly, lightly, and Jamie leaps, falls, blinks, falls, blinks until they both wind up sitting on rocks by the water. 

Still, as fun as the tour of Wind City's empty places has been, it's starting to get frustrating.

"Maybe he's left," Amal says.

"We're still getting rumours," Jamie says. "And when was the last time a mask went away without what he came for?" Some people change, Jamie thinks, when the state manages a rehabilitation programme that works, when they kick a drug, when jobs are available, when they get or lose their religion, when they manage through some quirk of luck to get out of the shitty cycle of crime and incarceration. And some people just leave, go north or south or overseas, but none of those people are the type of people who put on a mask and a beige costume and give themselves a code name and spraypaint letters three metres tall on the side of a building, THE VOICE WILL NOT BE SILENT FOR LONG. Those people, Jamie thinks, don't just leave. 

"Rumours," Amal says, faintly contemptuous, but she doesn't disagree. 

"And there's still the graffiti," Jamie says. "I know it's not necessarily him but let's look at what we've got," Jamie says, and spreads the folder out on the table. There's a few stills of the Voice, receipts for shipping manifests from a couple of cargos they think he intercepted and a couple that they think the Voice made himself, paying in cash from the robbery they still can't pin on him and picking up from silent distribution hubs in the dead of night, and photos of the messages he leaves behind. THE VOICE WILL NOT BE SILENT FOR LONG is popular. I AM THE LANGUAGE OF THE UNHEARD.

The graffiti is more specific. VOTE AGAINST THE PRISON INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX. REFUGEES WELCOME, MULTINATIONALS NOT. END INCARCERATION NOW. HOUSE THE HOMELESS. RIGHTS FOR PRISONERS. The Voice uses stencils for these instead of the bold strokes of spray paint that mark the scenes of his crimes; some of them are beautiful, a prisoner turning into a bird and leaving a cage, spraypainted in red onto a white wall in an alley off Square Street.

Amal reaches out and fingers that print. "You're sure this is him?" 

"Yeah," Jamie says. "Chemical analysis shows the paint is identical."

Amal squints. "Lots of people can buy spray paint."

"This particular paint is a mix of a couple of different colours of paint, thinned and then put through home-made spray cans," Jamie says. "It's distinctive. And then there's the tone."

"Ye-es," she agrees. "Noble hectoring." 

"I think he's waiting for something," Jamie says. "A triggering event. He's stockpiling whatever it is that he makes with the stuff he's been stealing, and they're all going to go boom at once some day. That's why we're hearing rumours but haven't got any crimes associated with the rumours."

"That's convincing. It doesn't explain why he's ahead of us all the time, though."

"No," Jamie says, and kicks idly at the couch he's sitting on. "Maybe he's just a very paranoid person. I mean, he is a caped criminal. He's probably got some quirks."

"Maybe," Amal says, but she doesn't sound convinced, and Jamie has to admit he isn't, either. 

* 

Jamie's embarrassed, afterwards, by how long it takes him to figure it out. Embarrassed might not be strong enough. He's humiliated, ashamed, furious, because when it all comes together in his mind it seems so blindingly fucking obvious, things click-click-clicking into place. 

The first puzzle piece he gets when he's hanging out with Sam in his lounge, half doing reading for class and half taking make-out breaks. Sam's flatmate comes in and clicks on the television. It's tuned to Parliament TV (and really, Jamie thinks, that should have been his first fucking clue. Who watches Parliament TV?) and someone's giving a speech about—something, prisoner rights, Jamie's only half listening. 

Sam looks over, though, gets distracted by it until Jamie flops up against him and looks pathetic. "Sorry, babe," Sam says. "It's just a really—never mind," and he gets his flatmate to switch over to Netflix. 

So that's the first clue. The second puzzle piece he's going through photos on Sam's phone while Sam's limp on the bed with post-orgasm laxitude, looking for a good photo to force Sam to set as his wallpaper. "Aw," he says, when he gets to some selfies of him and Sam in the wintry sun, standing in front of Parliament, but his brow wrinkles as he flips through that album. "Man, you've got a lot of crappy pocket photos of our seat of government in here," he says, looking through pictures of the backs of tourists and tour guides, a lopsided photo of the ceiling, another one of the corridor outside the debating chamber.

"Huh?" Sam says, tensing beside him enough to look over. "Oh," he says, when Jamie flips the phone around to show him, "You can delete those. I had my camera in burst mode and I didn't realise, there's tonnes of that crap in there."

"You've got too much spare space on this thing," Jamie, who has a massively overloaded iPhone from three years ago and has to delete photos every weekend, says, as he hits delete.

"Expandable memory is a beautiful thing," Sam says, and goes to wrestle his phone off Jamie. Jamie gets a couple of pretty good naked photos in the ensuing tussle. 

Things click, though, when Jamie's making dinner with his gran sitting at the kitchen table watching the news. He tunes in to the glossy-haired, glossy-voiced newsreader saying "...removing the right to vote from prisoners," and his gran making a revolted noise.

"Disgusting disenfranchisement," she says. 

Jamie puts the knife onto the chopping board, carefully, as he feels something in the back of his mind make a connection. "Turn it up, Gran, will you?"

She tchs, but does. "The Electoral Amendment (Prisoner Disenfranchisement) Act will have its third reading tomorrow," the newsreader says, "and is expected to pass by a narrow margin. The Human Rights Commission says …" 

"Gran," Jamie says, "I'm really sorry, but I've just remembered something and I've got to go."

*

It takes him precious time to dig his Blink costume out, to find Amal, and to convince her, so it's full dark and silent when they arrive at Parliament, slinking around the back. The hitches on the flagpole rattle in the wind and the lights flood the forecourt, but the building itself is quiet, darkened. 

"You're sure?" Amal says. 

"He's here," Jamie says. He can feel it, sort of, something tugging at him behind his heart. He wants badly to be wrong, but he knows he isn't. "We should hurry."

Of course, it's not actually that easy to discreetly break into Parliament after hours when you haven't being doing any prep. Eventually, the Shadow picks Jamie up and lets the wind take them through darkness up to an upper-floor window, out of sight of the forecourt and dark enough that Shadow just about passes for invisible. 

"Ready?" she says, and Jamie stares through the window into the empty office, nods, and blinks in. 

He turns around to see the Shadow watching him. She gestures, then taps her earpiece. "I'll find a way in," she says. "You find the Voice."

"I plan on it," Jamie says, and heads into the building.

*

He's in the debating chamber, of course. Jamie's not surprised. The place where politicians speak, where laws are passed, decisions made—not to mention where everything is broadcast—it's perfect for what the Voice wants. Attention, acknowledgment, the chance to criticise—Jamie doesn't know why he didn't see it sooner.

The place is a wreck when he gets there, covered in red paint, banners. Jamie's foot kicks something metal, and it explodes with a bang. He blinks in desperation, a few feet away, but it's not enough to save him from a splattering of paint. 

There's a security guard in the middle of the room, lying slumped on the floor. Jamie goes to him, checks his pulse. He's unconscious, won't wake when Jamie shakes him, but his pulse is steady, and Jamie can't feel an injury when he checks him. 

"Blink," someone says in the Voice's distorted tones, and Jamie looks up to see him. He's standing there in that stupid beige costume, on the big chair at the front of the room, staring at him. 

"We meet again," the Voice says. 

"Fuck you," Jamie says, and blinks away to the back of the room. 

"That's not very nice," the Voice says. It's hard to tell, but he sounds—unsettled, maybe. Good, Jamie thinks.

"You know, I always wanted to ask you how you picked your name," Jamie says. He drops a microphone down, pulls out his comm device to hook the two together, then takes a breath and blinks up to the top of the gallery. He starts picking his way around behind the cover of seats, talking into the comm, letting the mic broadcast it down below. "Your superpower is superspeed. You could have gone for the Streak, or the Bolt, or whatever."

"Have you figured it out yet?"

Jamie's circled round right behind the Voice; he's still got his back to Jamie, doesn't seem to have realised what Jamie's done yet. 

"Yeah. You're trying to speak for people without a voice," Jamie says. "I get it now," and he kind of wishes he didn't, as he leaps forward off the balcony and uses all of his momentum to crash into the Voice, shoving him forward into the huge wooden table that takes up most of the centre of the room. 

The Voice shouts, swears, tries to run, but Jamie's got a good grip on him, so they're wrestling, neither of them able to get their powers going. It's just the two of them, kicking and shoving, and that means Jamie's going to win, because he's been doing this for years now and the Voice—the Voice—

There's no point kidding himself, Jamie knows. The Voice only showed up in Wind City two years ago, when Sam moved to town. He's only been really active for the last nine months or so. And he's only been really _effective_ since Jamie got involved with Sam—since Sam started to know when the Shadow was going to be operating, because that's when Jamie made excuses about having to work. 

The Voice kicks and writhes but Jamie flips them, he's on top, and he's got the Voice pinned, enough that he can get his hands under the mask and yank, hoping he's wrong, hoping—but he isn't. Of course he isn't. Sam blinks up at him, snarling, and then his face smooths out and he mostly just looks sad. 

"Fuck," Jamie says. He'd known, he guesses, but he feels it like a body blow. 

"Jamie," Sam says, and tries to shove him off, tries to reach for him. He sounds devastated, but Jamie doesn't have any fucking sympathy for that, doesn't have any room. 

"Shut up," he says, and contradicts himself by asking, "How long did you—how long—"

"From the beginning," Sam says. He stops struggling, looking drained. Jamie feels like he's watching the conversation from outside of his body. "Jamie," Sam says, urgent. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I had to—but I do lo—"

"No you don't," Jamie says, heavy, and levers himself up. He goes for his cuffs, but he's—careless, he slips, and then Sam is twisting away and getting his feet under him and he's leaving in a blur, faster than Jamie can blink after him, especially in the mazy, dark, unfamiliar corridors, and soon enough Jamie has to admit that he's gone. He should … do something, he's pretty sure, but instead he puts his back against a wall, slides his way down until he's sitting, shoulders slumped, and waits for Shadow to find her way in.

*

She's there sooner rather than later, sounds like the flutter of silk in the wind arriving. 

"You heard?" he says, dull. 

She just presses her hand to his shoulder. "You okay?"

He shrugs. "I'm fine," he says, without bothering to put enough inflection into his voice to fool her. 

He can hear her choosing not to call bullshit and is pathetically grateful. "We need to clear the building," she says. 

"Where's security?" Jamie says, suddenly pissed, levering himself to his feet. "I know there are guards here, they even have bomb dogs, where the fuck are they?"

"Unconscious in their tea room," Amal says, so mildly Jamie feels the sting of embarrassment. "Except for a couple of them who are unconscious around the building."

"Right," he says, feeling himself blush in the dark. 

"I've called the police, but we may as well be able to tell them what to look for," she says, and so the two of them work silently through the building, collecting paintbomb after paintbomb, piling them together for the police to find. 

They sneak out just before the police arrive, vanishing into the darkness. Before they split up, the Shadow grabs Jamie's arm. "Nobody was hurt," she says. Her tone is horribly kind. "He was careful."

Jamie yanks his arm free. "So what," he says, and blinks away. 

*

Jamie only goes to class the next day because he's too exhausted to think of a lie for his gran, but Sam's not there, and he's not there two days later, either. Hating himself, Jamie hacks into the university's scheduling system and finds out when Sam's other classes are, telling himself it's so he can avoid them. But when he proves himself a liar and just happens to be walking past the lecture theatres where Sam's supposed to be, he isn't there. He's not at UniQ meetings, either. He doesn't show up for the student union meet-the-candidates evening, even though his flatmate's running and he and Jamie spent three hours two weeks ago papering the campus with her posters. Jamie tells himself he doesn't care.

Somewhere in there, Amal calls him into her office and tells him there's no evidence connecting Sam with the Voice. 

"Are you—"

"He was careful," she says, calm, eyes on his face. "He paid cash. There's no paper trail. He only met with the people he hired in costume. He knew exactly where the Parliament cameras were, so there's no video showing his face. And he won't have an alibi for when the Voice attacked, but nor do hundreds of other people in the city. Charges won't stick, unless you want to go public. You'd have to come out as Blink, use your personal testimony as evidence, and—"

"—you don't think I should."

"No," she says. 

"You never really thought he was that dangerous in the first place," Jamie says. 

"I still don't," she says. "I think everything he did was leading up to this one big blast, and now it's happened. It wasn't violent. If he'd done it during the day from behind a crowd barrier, it would have been legitimate protest activity. And we know his identity, and he knows we know, so we have that over him. You're right. I don't think you should blow your secret identity to put him in prison—and that's without the personal considerations."

"There aren't any personal considerations," Jamie says, but he knows he's too loud, and Amal doesn't say anything in response, just raises one cool eyebrow at him. 

"That's the situation," she says. "I'm not going to tell you what to do," but she is, as usual, right. 

*

Jamie stews and stews and doesn't go out as Blink, doesn't punch bad guys, just lies in bed, staring at the ceiling, wishing that he could at least use this newfound free time to catch up on his sleep. 

Sam doesn't come to class, and doesn't come to class. Wind City's too small to avoid people, really. Jamie's bumped into exes in class, buying milk, in tiny toilets in noisy clubs, but Jamie doesn't see Sam, and doesn't see him, and then it's two weeks later and he finds himself standing in front of Sam's door, staring at it. 

He lifts his hand to knock, but doesn't, drops his hand again, turns around, walks up the path, turns back. _Wow, you chickenshit,_ he thinks to himself, and steels himself enough to walk straight up to the door, hand going to the doorknob.

The door opens before he touches it, swings wide because Sam's on the other side, looking about as tired as Jamie feels. "Hi," he says. "I've been expecting you," and he offers Jamie his wrists. 

Jamie stares at them, then at Sam. He looks more than tired, now that Jamie looks. His eyes look sunken, a little bit red. His hair is dirty and so's his shirt. Jamie feels something in his chest ache, briefly, but he ignores it, and brushes past Sam's outstretched hands to enter the flat, throw himself down on the couch, spreading out obnoxiously.

The house is still and quiet, Sam's flatmates nowhere to be seen or heard. Sam swings the door shut and leans up against it, looking at Jamie. 

"Aren't you going to arrest me?" His tone is casual; Jamie can only just hear the tension. 

"Aren't you going to try to kill me?" Jamie says back. 

"No," Sam says. "I never tried to kill you."

"Then no, I'm not going to arrest you. Or drag you to a police station to have them arrest you, which is what I'd actually have to do, by the way."

Sam's face changes.

"I haven't got any evidence," Jamie grits out. "Except, you know. Me. It's not because I—it's not because I feel—what I feel, that I'm not dragging you down there right now."

"What you feel?" Sam says, faintly enough Jamie can barely hear him. 

"That doesn't matter," Jamie says, and barrels right over Sam opening his mouth. "That's not why I'm here. I just want to know."

Sam nods. "Fair enough," he says. "What do you want to know?"

Jamie feels bitter. "Everything," he says. "Why. When. Was it—was any of it real?"

"How can you—it was real," Sam says. "I don't blame you for being mad, I don't—but it wasn't—"

"When did you know?" Jamie says. "You said you knew—from the beginning. Is that, what, first date, second date—when?"

Sam nods, sighs. "I don't know if you even remember. We were in class, and I was sitting in front of you. You told your friend your mum was going to call you, and then that night—"

Jamie does remember. He remembers the supervillain letting him take a call from his mum, remembers thinking how weird that was. He also remembers Sam asking him out the next day. 

"So I thought then, probably. And then of course when I asked you out—it was obvious."

"Obvious," Jamie says. "It wasn't fucking obvious to me."

"I know," Sam says. "Please, Jamie—I hated lying to you."

"Not enough to tell me," Jamie says. "Not enough to not ask me out in the first place—because that's why, isn't it? You never looked at me until you knew I was Blink, until I was a source of inside fucking information. That's why we didn't see you for months, it's why you knew we were coming. You really did just know we were coming."

Sam nods. He looks sick. "You're right," he says. "That was why. I'm—I know I can't fix that, Jamie."

"You really can't," Jamie says, and he can feel his voice crack half-way through the sentence and has to cover his face for a second, feeling the hot rushing of tears behind his eyes. 

He has to take a few breaths to get himself under control, and when he takes his hands away Sam's come over to him, is kneeling before him. Sam takes one of his hands. 

Jamie says, "This fucking sucks, Sam."

"I know," Sam says. His voice is rough. "Does it change anything if I say I'm done with the Voice? It's over."

"I kinda figured you blew your wad, yeah," Jamie says, wry, and Sam makes an automatic grossed-out face. That makes Jamie laugh, and for a second everything feels normal, like he's hanging out with the guy he's been seeing and nothing is horribly wrong, nobody ever betrayed anyone and lied to them for months. 

"So," Sam says, and Jamie's laughter dies down. He sounds uncertain. "So I'm done, and you're not going to arrest me. And I understand," his voice wobbles, "if you don't want anything to do with me, but I don't want to just—not say this." He takes a deep breath. "I didn't say this because I didn't want to say it while I was lying to you, but—I do. Love you, I mean." He manages to meet Jamie's eyes for the last of that, so he must see Jamie's face crumple when his heart squeezes. 

"I already kinda knew you did," Jamie says, hoarse. "And I want to let that mean something, Sam, but I don't know if I can."

Sam's nodding. "I understand," he says, again, and releases Jamie's hand, backs away. 

Jamie nods to himself, grits his teeth and pulls himself off the couch. 

"I'll turn myself in," Sam says, suddenly. "If that would help."

Jamie stares at him. "No," he says.

"Right." Sam nods a few times. "Right, okay. Well. I guess I'll see you around, Jamie."

"I guess so," Jamie says, and walks out the door. 

He only gets halfway up the path to the street before he's turning again, opening the door without knocking, striding back in. Sam's just standing there, in the middle of the room where Jamie left him; he doesn't react when Jamie walks in, doesn't do anything, just stands perfectly still when Jamie walks up to him, puts a hand behind his head and kisses him. 

"You should come back to class," Jamie says, when he pulls back. 

Sam looks dazed.

"There's only a few weeks before the end of the semester," Jamie says. "You should be there."

He waits for Sam's face to clear, for him to nod, before he says, "I will see you," firmly, and walks out again. He feels a weight lift off him; he's almost whistling when he gets to the street, and he sticks his hand in his pocket, pulls out his phone, calls Amal. "I can patrol tonight," he says, cheerful. "Yeah, I'm fine. I'm back in the game, boss."

**Author's Note:**

> This story is set in an imaginary city that has a lot in common with Wellington, New Zealand in the same way that Gotham City has a lot in common with New York, New York. I hope it's amusing without familiarity with that city, but if you think you recognise something, you probably do. Whangamomona is a real town, and I would like to thank the girl I went to uni with for wholesale stealing her background. (She's not, to my knowledge, a masked supervillain.) A fun fact I could not work into this story is that Whangamomona has a semi-annual festival where they declare themselves independent from the rest of New Zealand and have, e.g., stock-whip cracking competitions.
> 
> I hope this came across in the story but politically I have a lot of sympathy for Sam. Here are some of the posters he has on his wall that you might not have recognised: [Parihaka](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/5185RgqpdKL.jpg) ([2](http://www.art-newzealand.com/Issue97/parihaka8.jpg), [3](https://www.thechildrensbookshop.co.nz/document/photos/000/069/384/large_9780864735201.jpg)), [the Rainbow Warrior](http://payload273.cargocollective.com/1/10/328268/7778406/Walter-Rainbow-Warrior1_905.jpg), [the Howard League](https://howardleaguestudents.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/second20poster20helvet20final201.jpg), [Stop the Tour](http://christchurchcitylibraries.com/Heritage/Posters/1981SpringbokTour/1981-07-03-EPH06-01.jpg), [No Pride in Prisons](https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/701954062455996416/cD0lOebG.png).


End file.
